2015.03.12 the get-ready men

Doing a bit of follow-on reading from the item that suggested the title of this note, I thought that there was a pretty profound little thought expressed in an interview. This was that perhaps, if humanity even needed a little ad campaign, it could create a little advertising slogan for itself, saying, simply-

“cognitive dissonance… it’s what we do!”

Evidence of that continues to pile up at what seems to be a dramatically increasing rate.

I took the phrase the get-ready men from an article that was cited as a reference at the end of an online review of the book The Long Emergency, now that a decade has passed since its publication.

The Long Emergency is a very important book, arguably one of the most important of the 21st century so far, something that I absolutely regard as required reading, along with a few others. Published in 2005, it nails a batch of subjects right square on the head, and a review of the book a decade later pretty much confirms how well he did.

I credit Kunstler with being the first person to draw my attention to the subject of our predicament about petroleum resources and use and all that goes with it, with that coming a while before I actually read this book, as I read an online article by Kunstler on the Rolling Stone website sometime around that same period.

It’s worth noting, again, that it was also right around a decade ago that a report to the US Department of Energy was produced, informally known as “the Hirsch report”, that spelled out where we were and where we were heading in our oil situation, given the reality of the patterns found by Hubbert, and how we might deal with it on a national level.

It’s a little repetitive, having been over all this before, to point out that these things that are now a decade old, the Hirsch report and Kunstler’s book, have this strange common characteristics. They’re both examining vitally important matters and being right on the mark, while getting a lot of serious attention from quite a few people who recognize the stuff as being so important, and at the same time, being largely ignored on a broad public level, and in the case of the Hirsch report, being a document of a serious study for the US Department of Energy, ignored by government officialdom. Of course, that begs for asking questions about who might, in fact, have not ignored it at all, but gives it no public acknowledgement, keeping it quiet, hidden from the citizenry, but I suppose that thought will get some people wound up and into the realm of chattering about “conspiracy theory” and everything that comes with that.

Part of Kunstler’s predictions of possible future included, as they still do, an ongoing problem phenomenon of people in positions of government power and authority becoming more and more deranged and irrational as they become more and more detached from events and circumstances in actual reality. This, unfortunately, continues to display itself pretty much every day more or less as Kunstler and others have predicted.

Suddenly, news appears telling us that, for no apparent good reason, Washington has declared the nation of Venezuela as “a national security threat” to the United States of America.

What is this sudden “national security threat”, exactly, that leads to the President of the United States declaring this to be a “national emergency”? [Also, as a side note, just how many current perpetual “national emergencies” do we have declared?] From the looks of things, it’s actually pretty simple- Venezuela is a country with oil deposits in its territory, and the people running the Venezuelan government apparently have the unmitigated gall to act as if they’re in charge of their own government, not Washington.

I’ve been acutely aware of the way that this little personal writing space has gone, over the longer run, in terms of giving a lot of focus to particular subjects while leaving others off to the side, on the shelf. Somebody coming around to read my notes here might think I’m trying to do a political blog, even though I really have no interest in doing any such thing. It’s more a case of things imposing themselves and becoming unavoidable, just in the course of being a human being trying to live and function here and now. It’s just an endless flow, a barrage of insanity.

The madness and misbehavior and massive dishonesty in government and politics is a whole shitpile of a subject all its own, aggravated and complicated by the farce of what most people in the US today “consume” as news, and the whole stupid phenomenon of what I’ve been calling bipolar political order for some months now, a real problem, as people seem to get sucked further and further into that simplistic game, apparently thinking that it makes things simpler.

I’ve been writing about all this for a long time, the political and governmental insanity and an assortment of topics under what I’ve referred to as the three big E subjects of Energy, Economy, and Ecology (or Earth), as have many people I point out often, the assortment of writers one commenter described as “truth-tellers” recently.

The extra problem layered over the problems remains the same, people caught up in determination to avoid it all, or pretend it’s something different, that they see as easier to deal with. That’s certainly true among people in supposed positions of leadership, for all the self-serving reasons that go into those games, and among the general populace, it certainly plays a fundamental role in the whole game of bipolar political disorder where people pretend it’s a simple case of The Others being the whole problem, and everything would be grand if only My Side had control.

Sadly, Kunstler might have touched upon the biggest overall theme in the very first sentence of the book The Long Emergency, beginning the first chapter “Sleepwalking Into The Future”- “Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychology, famously remarked that ‘people cannot stand too much reality’“.

That might be the most basic problem here.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 14th, 2015 at 10:44 AM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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